[WikiEN-l] deletionism in popular culture

[Ryan Delaney]

On Mon, Nov 2, 2009 at 2:32 AM, Charles Matthews <
charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:

> Ryan Delaney wrote:
> > On Fri, Oct 30, 2009 at 10:44 PM, Samuel Klein <meta.sj at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> >> Now that's a lovely perennial idea.  There's no point in hard deleting
> any
> >> article save to protect private information in the history.  You can
> pure
> >> wiki delete; or even pure wiki delete and protect the blank page; but
> >> removing the work done from view of interested passers-by is wholly
> >> unnecessary.
> >>
> >>
> >>
> > I haven't found any persuasive argument against it. Usually the objection
> is
> > "but then there would be edit wars over deletion!"
> >
> The main argument is rationalisation: if you ever thought that it was a
> valid idea to rationalise the scope of the project at any point, you'd
> probably start with the thought that with hundreds of thousands of
> articles deleted every year and most of that material being at best
> thoroughly marginal to what we are trying to do, then (you might argue
> that) having it all around is on balance not really helpful. So against
> that you can argue that WP doesn't need rationalisation of any kind: it
> can just go on growing how it likes given the resources. People seem to
> draw their own conclusions on this debate. Mine are based largely on the
> kind of focus or lack of it you see in people who want to search through
> those millions of deleted words, rather than anything else they could be
> trawling through.
>
> Charles


I'm having trouble following your meaning, I think because I'm not familiar
with how you are using "rationalisation". Can you explain a bit more please?

- causa sui